Saturday, August 09, 2025

Wired, A Love Story (5)


(This is the fifth in a series.)

At HotWired, the traditional production schedule of a daily or a weekly print outlet simply didn’t work for us since we could publish pretty much anytime we wished, which is what we did. This was the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, which had just been ushered in by the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the maturing of cable TV, but there were no set news industry standards yet for how to manage organizations on the web facing that kind of “always-on” reality.

That meant that some of us at the top had to be always-on as well.

Looking for advice, I started to meet with a handful of other Bay Area executives pondering similar workflow problems at CNET, Knight-Ridder, Yahoo, @Home and others.

The specific website issues were basic ones: How to position banner ads, display color-coded links, indicate sponsored content and the like. (Some of the folks in our ad-hoc group went on to help form the nonprofit Online News Association in 1999.)

Meanwhile, throughout 1996 and the first half of 1997, Wired was aggressively entering into new partnerships and business deals. The global news service Reuters embedded a personable editor named Dick Satran in our newsroom as we negotiated a deal to distribute our digital news globally.

This was a major development. Now the Wired brand could circle the globe like the Associated Press with a strong technology focus. We felt we could quickly take over ownership of this new content space. That was an ambitious goal we set for ourselves.

Internally, in order to rationalize the chaotic jumble of sub-brands into a cohesive whole, we decided to rebrand the entire enterprise Wired Digital, with one umbrella product called Wired News. Our prior identity as HotWired would have to hit the dust. This was a logical but difficult decision that required all of my skill managing up to convince Louis that it was the right thing to do.

In the aftermath of the failed IPOs, Louis had become somewhat isolated from the senior execs on the digital side, so they asked me to convince him of the branding change, since he and I continued to have our spirited weekly discussions as always.

Plus I fully supported the change myself; HotWired already seemed dated on the ever-changing web.

Louis didn’t like the idea, but I worked with him and eventually he came around to it.

As part of this transition, we had to sell off some of our popular but less relevant properties, notably the successful alt-health channel "Ask Dr. Weil," edited by Steven Petrow. We sold it to Time Inc., which led to a personal reunion for me with Time senior executive Dan Okrent, an old colleague from The Michigan Daily days (1966-9).

As I showed Okrent around our shop, we compared notes on our separate journeys since college through competing media worlds -- him at the pinnacle of the traditional media world in New York; me at the bleeding edge of new media world in San Francisco.

We both knew our worlds were colliding head-on in real time; neither of us knew which one, if either, would prevail.

In order to fill out the staff for Wired News, we hired a few experienced editors to provide guidance to the younger staff members, since few of the latter had actually attended journalism school or spent time at newspapers, magazines or broadcast media companies. What I hoped was that we would create a blend of the old and the new that preserved journalistic standards while breaking new ground.

And we did break some stories, for example by revealing clues in the html coding behind the website of the Heaven’s Gate cult about why 40 of them committed mass suicide in San Diego in 1997.

But during the spring and summer of 1997, despite our best efforts on the digital side, dark storm clouds were beginning to appear on corporate Wired Inc.'s horizon. The failed IPOs had undermined confidence in Louis's leadership and an ambitious set of younger execs had been moved into positions of influence inside the company by outside investors.

They began plotting a takeover.

Aware of the rumblings for management change, I chose to double down on my loyalty to Louis and his vision; especially because my dozens of young staff members were literally pouring their hearts out building a new media company according to that vision -- one where their own dreams might also have a fighting chance to come true.

This was all probably going to be ending badly for me, I began to realize, but it wouldn’t be the first (or the last) time for that to happen. Besides, loyalty to the person who had believed in me and given me the freedom to build a successful product called Wired News was the right thing to do — for me, for him and for my staff.

But it also proved to be fatal. For us, the hourglass was running out.

(To be concluded tomorrow.)

HEADLINES:

 

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Friday, August 08, 2025

Wired, A Love Story (4)

(Fourth in a series.)



Whether we were aware of it or not, our creative teams at HotWired/Wired Digital in 1996-7 were helping design the future of the media industry. There was no roadmap but there was a sense of urgency. And as one of those in charge, I figured the kind of manager the staff really needed was one who knew when to stay out of their way and when to provide guidance.

We were inventing at hyper-speed.

And at the online side of the company, our staffers desperately needed someone with a direct channel to Wired co-founder and CEO Louis Rossetto. Without Louis’s blessing, many of their promising new ideas would die on the vine.

I was that person.

Politics of the left-right variety had very little to do with how the events I am chronicling here unfolded. Politics of the inter-personal variety would have much more to do with the outcome, however.

Before I could lobby Louis on my staff’s behalf, I had to understand in detail the ideas they were proposing, which ranged from simple to complex, original, flaky, redundant, cynical, silly or promising. So I established an open-door style of management, which wasn't terribly difficult because there were no doors on my office. We all sat together in one big open space spread over two floors connected by a spiral staircase in the middle.

There were a few airless conference rooms so we gathered there when we could, although as the sleep-deprived father of a new baby boy, I occasionally had trouble staying alert in them. But my assistant booked consecutive 15-30 minute sessions from early morning until evening for me every workday and repeated cups of coffee took care of the rest.

There were endless subjects to talk over because initially we were in essence a multimedia company covering everything. The staffers usually wanted to meet me in groups — there were several people on each team. 

It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the Gen X cohort as a group. They were a tad older than my oldest child, who was born when I was at Rolling Stone. They were a bunch of smart, cranky iconoclasts stretching the limits of Internet technology to tell stories in new ways. They were cynically idealistic with a creative spirit that was infectious. They also were rebellious.

They reminded me of the Rolling Stone crowd, actually, from 20 years earlier. They had their own interpretation of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, which was displayed usually — but not always —after closing time, sometimes on the roof. A few of them partied hard. Alas, I didn’t join my staff members in these activities. While they partied, I was singing babies to sleep.

But I did know that the neighborhood around our office still contained some of the same bars and clubs we'd hung out at back in my RS days, although probably under new management. Over the years, tiny South Park had gotten completely gentrified from a quaint tree-lined loop where black families lived in a tight community into what was now a disjointed hipster lunch hangout/epicenter of the digital revolution.

You might say the music was different but the venue the same. Meanwhile, at the corporate level of Wired Inc., big plans were afoot. Louis and the leadership wanted to take the company public and cash in like the dot.com entrepreneurs the magazine celebrated, and they put together an all-star cast of VC’s to do it. But when they first tried to do that in the summer of 1996, a temporary hiccup in the stock market for red-hot tech stocks caused them to withdraw the offer.

Later in the year a second try at an IPO failed as well, which was a much more serious signal that trouble lay ahead. But by then I was too busy managing our scores of workers and our emergence as a viable web-based media company to give it more than a passing thought. 

On the industrial level, we were becoming extremely proficient not only at launching new websites, but building production systems to push out our voluminous flows of content. Publishing stories on the web required a series of editorial and technical steps by staff members with different skills and this all had to be done by hand. (Automated platforms like Wordpress appeared years later.) 

So we had to devise our own process that ushered each piece through the various stages of production quickly and efficiently until it was ready to go live.

One of those steps was fact-checking. Among our numerous correspondents was a young fellow named Matt Drudge in L.A., who seemed to have his finger on the pulse of rumors circulating around Hollywood and Washington D.C. But we discovered many of his reports required serious fact-checking before we could publish them.

A few years later, one of Drudge’s rumors would turn out to be true and it would almost destroy Bill Clinton’s presidency. But by then, the events I’m describing here would feel like ancient history. 

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

  • Israeli Security Cabinet Approves Full Military Takeover of Gaza (NYT)

  • Led by Trump, Republicans push to redraw election maps in multiple states (WP)

  • FBI granted request to 'locate' fleeing Texas House Democrats, Sen. Cornyn says (ABC)

  • Texas redistricting feud escalates as Democrats face bomb and FBI threats (BBC)

  • Trump Just Did What Not Even Nixon Dared (Atlantic)

  • Donald Trump’s attack on statistics agency echoes strongmen leaders, economists say (FT)

  • Trump is nominating Stephen Miran to temporarily fill vacancy at the Fed (CNN)

  • More than 60 countries scramble to respond to Trump’s latest tariffs (Guardian)

  • Trump seeks to change how census collects data and wants to exclude immigrants in US illegally (AP)

  • Trump could meet Putin over Ukraine as soon as next week (Reuters)

  • What Happens to Public Media Now? (New Yorker)

  • Environmental Protection Agency in Name Only (American Prospect)

  • France battles biggest wildfire since 1949. (Reuters)

  • Trump sent a chilling warning from the White House to late night TV hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, as well as radio icon Howard Stern, claiming "they are next." [HuffPost]

  • On Vaccines, Kennedy Has Broken Sharply With the Mainstream (NYT)

  • Blue whales have gone silent. Why that has scientists worried about Earth’s biggest animals ... and the ocean (Independent)

  • OpenAI releases GPT-5, a potential barometer for whether artificial intelligence hype is justified (AP)

  • China Turns to A.I. in Information Warfare (NYT)

  • Claude Fans Threw a Funeral for Anthropic’s Retired AI Model (Wired)

  • The Insider’s Guide to San Francisco’s A.I. Boom (NYT)

  • DOJ Removes All Mentions Of Justice From Website (The Onion)

 

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Thursday, August 07, 2025

Wired, A Love Story (3)


(Third in a series)

Early in 1996 as our workforce at HotWired expanded, we outgrew the original office, which was adjacent to Wired magazine, so we moved a block south to another converted warehouse at 660 Third Street.

For me, if the parallels from my time at Rolling Stone two decades earlier weren't already in mind, they now became inescapable. From a window next to my desk at HotWired I could look directly into the office across the street at 625 where Howard Kohn and I had written our three-part series about Patty Hearst and the SLA in 1975-6.

One of many similarities between the two companies was the almost constant stream of celebrities who wanted to visit us when they came to San Francisco. At Rolling Stone, it had been rock stars, of course, but also journalists, professors, actors and politicians.

HotWired was no different, but the visitors now included future billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as well as virtually every other aspiring Internet entrepreneur on the planet. Also there were tech-savvy musicians like Brian Eno and politicians like Bill Bradley, a former Olympic basketball player and senator who was running for president. 

Among those who wanted to speak with me specifically were reporters from the Washington Post, Newsweek, the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, NPR and the major TV networks. They marveled at the scene as I sprinkled my newly memorized web terms liberally into sound bites that made me sound like an expert.

But many of the reporters also confided to me that this whole scene made them uncomfortable because if the digital revolution succeeded it seemed likely to threaten our profession. Not to mention what it would mean for our society at large.

I was hopeful they were wrong on both counts, but 30 years later, it’s clear my optimism was misplaced. The devastation to the media world is obvious for all to see. Just look around. So many newspapers have closed that in most cities it is a surprise to discover that one still exists. Thousands of once-important newspapers have closed their operations since the Web started disrupting their business models circa 1994.

Old media companies couldn’t just “give it away” when it came to content. They needed the revenue from subscribers and sponsors and newsstand sales and classified ads to keep operating. One of the early harbingers of their doom was the overnight success of Craigslist, launched across town in 1995 by an unassuming fellow named Craig Newmark.

San Francisco newspaper executive Phil Bronstein reminded me many years later that I had warned him when Craigslist first appeared that he should try to get the Hearst Corp. to buy it and that they they might regret not doing so later. That was an understatement.

Newspapers have not been the only victims. TV and radio have suffered greatly from the digital revolution as well, losing audiences and advertising share. As have magazines. Book publishing has been decimated.

Meanwhile, the new media world has splintered into a thousand shards of digital sites catering to niche audiences and even more niche opinions. Losing the media industry was one thing. Losing our democracy is another. Fringe theories, conspiracy thinking, extremist movements have all flourished in the Digital Age, ultimately threatening our most precious freedoms in the process.

But that was not the story as we envisioned it back at HotWired in 1996.

At that moment, a stock market frenzy was making Internet millionaires out of 26-year-olds right and left. It was widely known that Wired, too, was preparing for its own IPO -- initial public offering — later that year. 

One of the documents I carried around with me as a reminder of where we headed was the Wired prospectus for potential investors. It described how Wired Inc. would help lead the rise of an Internet economy to become a global media empire.

No small part of that vision hinged on the efforts of our team at HotWired, since the kinds of multiples envisioned in the prospectus could never be generated by an analog magazine alone.

So at HotWired we were experimenting with a wide range of content strategies, including a search engine (HotBot), advertising models (the banner ad was a HotWired creation), the earliest web blogs (like Suck), interactive bulletin boards, audio programs (presaging podcasts) and digital video, which included a fledgling TV program called Netizen TV.

We also foresaw the future of interactive broadband video. We were involved with Microsoft and NBC when they created MSNBC with that in mind. I was among a small group of Wired execs who flew to New York during the negotiations that led to the cable network’s formation — we ate steak and smoked cigars and toasted a future we thought might include Wired and by extension each of us.

They were heady times.

For the first time in my working life, I held options to purchase shares in a company that would vest over time — four years to be exact. And as a vice-president, my holdings were large enough to potentially make me a modestly wealthy man in the process -- a prospect that had never even occurred to me before.

But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself in the story, which is much bigger than the fate of any one person. Back in 1996 and 1997, pretty much anything still seemed possible. 

(To be continued.)

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Wednesday, August 06, 2025

Wired, A Love Story (2)

(Second in a series.)

By the time I joined the HotWired team in late 1995, I'd already been working in media for almost 30 years. This was not necessarily a good thing in the eyes of my new colleagues, who were busily upending the analog media world I came from with a digital alternative they considered superior.

“Content wants to be free” was a standard rallying cry at HotWired, which was not yet two years old and was undergoing a massive growth spurt fueled by corporate advertising revenue. We were hiring people almost as fast as we could; I joked to friends that our interviewing strategy was to lock the door behind candidates so they couldn't leave once they were inside. 

In point of fact. nobody wanted to leave -- if you were Gen-X and into creative media work in the mid-1990s, this is exactly where you wanted to be.

As for me, I was twice as old as most of the other employees, and my career had been almost entirely in the alternativemedia, not the mainstream. From my days in the underground press to SunDance to Rolling Stone to the Center for Investigative Reporting and from New West to Mother Jones and public radio plus other stops along the way, I had pretty much remained outside of traditional journalism institutions.

But in all those jobs I did adhere strictly to the values and standards of traditional journalists.

My new colleagues were early-stage writers and reporters and editors and designers and photographers and engineers and interface experts and audience research specialists and several other categories of workers, almost all of them in their mid-to-late 20s.

I was sort of like their weird uncle.

They all used a techno lingo unfamiliar to me, with terms like web browser, domain name, interactivity, bandwidth, interface, pixels, TCP/IP, url, html, coding, style sheets, IP address, network domain and on and on -- so many strange words that I scribbled them down on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket exactly as I did with foreign language phrases when visiting non-English-speaking countries overseas.

After a few months, I finally got around to asking someone what all of these words actually meant. He smirked and quipped: "Don't worry what they mean; just sprinkle them liberally into your speech and your market value will triple."

As I pondered that, the daily political site my team produced called The Netizen began to flourish. We rapidly built a large audience during the early months of election cycle 1996, which attracted the interest of Wired's co-founder and CEO, Louis Rossetto. 

He had a reputation as an articulate visionary but a difficult boss; many employees seemed fearful of his intensity. He was a fierce advocate of libertarian political views, a lifelong Republican, pro-corporate and dismissive of leftist ideas. 

So when Rossetto first summoned me to a private meeting I really didn't know what to expect. Most of my previous work had appeared in left-leaning publications, and he probably assumed my politics were defined by that. Maybe he wanted to suss me out.

From our very first meeting, the Louis I got to know was quite different from his image. He was smart and opinionated, true, but also quiet-spoken, thoughtful and happy to debate the issues of the day with me. Most importantly, he was committed to remaining open-minded about how we covered those issues in The Netizen.

That kind of tolerance was essential if I was to remain part of the Wired organization, which I already knew I wanted to do. Louis and I quickly developed a mutual trust that allowed us to argue through the various sides of the issues we were covering and agree to disagree when we could not reach a consensus.

Meanwhile he never interfered in my actual editorial choices, though they often differed from what I knew he would have preferred.

The ultimate test came when one of our cantankerous Netizen columnists decided to write a piece savagely critical of Wired itself. He decided to lambast the institution and everything it stood for in his daily column. 

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! This surely would be too much for Louis to handle, I thought.

As the hit piece was about to post, as a courtesy to Louis I let him know what was coming. His response was shocking and refreshingly direct: 

"Let him rant!" 

We ran the piece unedited. 

For me, that moment confirmed that Rossetto was committed to his principles, which started with free speech for everyone.

Looking back on that incident, I realize that by then dealing with bosses other people considered difficult was becoming something of a habit for me; after all, I'd studied under one the masters, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. Others may have feared these men and their outbursts, but I genuinely liked them and developed a deep fondness for both Jann and Louis that lasted well past my jobs with them.

A few months after the “Let him rant” episode, Louis suddenly summoned me to his office again for an unscheduled meeting. Again, I assumed there must be bad news of some sort, but instead he surprised me by saying he wanted to move me to the top of the org chart as V.P. of Content Management for all of the websites in the HotWired network.

I was content producing The Netizen and hadn't sought this role at all but of course I agreed to it, especially because it came with a hefty raise. (And at home we had another baby on the way.) 

In my new role, dozens of people now reported to me, including my former bosses who seemed stunned by the change. 

If I was going to head up this brilliant, unruly band of web revolutionaries, by acting as “the adult in the room” (as some called me), I was going to have to be always switched to “on.”

(To be continued)

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Tuesday, August 05, 2025

Wired: A Love Story


(Late 1995)

After helping a tiny group of entrepreneurs launch Salon, I was invited over to tour the headquarters of Wired magazine by one of the magazine's editors who knew me from my years teaching at U-C Berkeley.

The magazine’s office culture was casual with cubicles, computers, rock music playing in the background and a few dogs lounging around.

But the real attraction lay on the other side of a common kitchen area where HotWired — the online side of Wired magazine was located.

It was a striking scene. Row after row of 20-somethings sat working on laptops perched on doors balanced over sawhorses, with the Chili Peppers blasting and a whiff of marijuana in the air. A couple of my former interns stood up to greet me and showed how they were designing content for a wide range of websites.

Right after I left the office, I made a call home to say, "I've just found the next place I want to work." 

Several weeks later, a call came from a young HotWiredling offering me a job as producer of what would be the web's first daily political news site, called The Netizen.

Although the starting salary was barely half what I'd previously been making, and I did have the needs of a new family at home to consider, I accepted the offer without hesitation and said I could start the next day.

On day one, I was introduced to a small staff of producers and designers with hardly any journalism experience. But they were smart, highly motivated and ready to invent something cool.

I immediately hired two of the brightest young journalists (and former students) I knew from Berkeley and set out to work with the engineering team -- the head of which was a former colleague from Mother Jones, and we set a crash course to build The Netizen.

We launched the website in something like 28 days.

It was a presidential election year, so we hired three experienced political writers as our correspondents and they fanned out across the campaign trail to cover the re-election effort of incumbent Bill Clinton and his Republican challengers, including the eventual nominee, Bob Dole.

I had been assured complete editorial independence for the operation, and it quickly attracted a very large audience among the early adopters then flocking to the web. Day after day we published smart, snarky takes from all sides of the political spectrum with a decidedly libertarian streak, in accordance with the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley.

For me it was exciting -- new ideas sprouted daily, young staffers were quickly developing editorial skills, and we were able collectively to generate controversy almost without trying.

Email was still a new phenomenon, and the feedback from readers that poured in upon publication included some that were outright abusive, often misogynistic, which disturbed me and was a harbinger of things to come.

Thinking back with the benefit of hindsight, I had an early glimpse of how hate, lies and conspiracies might flourish in this new environment, but I didn’t know what to do about that.

Free speech was free speech, I told myself somewhat naively. And outside of the negative stuff, I liked the chaotic two-way communication cacophony of the web.

Our readers blasted off at our writers in ways traditional journalism never had tolerated. Those of us from “legacy media” were used to being the last word on a topic. In this new media, we were only the first. It was a conversation, not a broadcast.

Everyone handled it in relatively good spirits at The Netizen as we quickly rocketed into position as one of the leading news sites on the web.

If I was the pilot, it felt like I was guiding a ship into open space, destination unknown.

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

  • The Bureau of Labor Denial (WSJ)

  • Trump stokes conspiracies about jobs data, as White House defends firing BLS chief (CNBC)

  • Trump has already put in motion his next effort to subvert upcoming federal elections in 2026 and 2028. This time the call is coming from inside the White House — and that should scare you more than anything. [HuffPost]

  • 'Vote him out!': Town hall erupts in anger at Nebraska GOP congressman over Trump megabill, policies (ABC)

  • Texas House Republicans vote to issue civil arrest warrants for fleeing Democrats (WP)

  • Texas Republicans say 'hunt down' Democrats who are leaving state over redistricting (ABC)

  • The vast majority of US adults are stressed about grocery costs (AP-NORC)

  • China is winning the trade war Trump started (WP)

  • Videos of Israeli hostages in Gaza increase pressure on Netanyahu for a ceasefire (NPR)

  • Israel’s Last Chance (Atlantic)

  • State Department may require visa applicants to post bond of up to $15,000 to enter the US (AP)

  • Russia warns against threats after Trump repositions nuclear submarines (WP)

  • A top aide to President Donald Trump accused India of effectively financing Russia's war in Ukraine by purchasing oil from Moscow, after the US leader escalated pressure on New Delhi to stop buying Russian oil. (Reuters)

  • Trump Smashed an Obama Legacy Item—Harming Many and Pleasing Few (The 

    Bulwark)

  • The Pentagon’s New Isolationism (Atlantic)

  • The inside story of the Murdoch editor taking on Donald Trump (Guardian)

  • Zuckerberg fired the fact-checkers. We tested their replacement. (WP)

  • Los Angeles County has a new task taking care of dogs and cats after their owners were detained or deported in immigration raids that picked up this summer under the Trump administration. From June 10, the county has taken in 28 animals, 22 of whom are dogs. (Reuters)

  • The AI job cuts are accelerating (Financial Times)

  • How Small Business Can Survive Google’s AI Overview (Forbes)

  • Big Tech’s hefty AI spending is reshaping the slowing economy (WP)

  • Study: More Americans Converting To Mormonism In Hopes Of Getting Hulu Series (The Onion)

 

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Monday, August 04, 2025

Telling Stories


One night recently, I was babysitting my two youngest grandchildren, ages four and six. Their parents were out for the evening and the kids wanted me to tell them a story at bedtime.

Now, I should explain that as a grandfather, I have a certain reputation as a story-teller to uphold, if only in my own mind, so I usually dig deep on these occasions.

“Once upon a time, far far away there was a village where everything was backwards and upside-down,” I started. “All of the people walked backwards, for example, and everything happened in the opposite ways from what we’re used to.”

Thinking quickly, I came up with another example. “Instead of a kid jumping on a trampoline in Backwardsville, the trampoline jumps on the kid!”

This elicited the reactions I’d hoped for as the kids’ eyes opened widely and they laughed delightedly at the thought.”

“What else happened, Grandpa?”

As I stumbled to provide more details, I realized that I had started this story with a strong lede, but I had no idea where the story was going.

After some scrambling, I resolved the story with a series of lame examples of villagers walking backwards, but as the kids settled in for a long summer’s nap, I was aware that my story could have been much better if only I had thought up an ending before getting started.

And that, dear reader, is my advice to young writers (or old ones) hoping to strengthen their story-telling skills. Know where you are going and avoid painting yourself into a corner like I did while babysitting.

The kids’ father (my son) came out with a quip the following day when I was recounting my dilemma that perfectly captures the point.

“Actually, you knew the ending of your story just fine, Dad,” he said, picking up on the backwards theme. “You just didn’t know how it all had started.”

HEADLINES:

  • Democrats flee Texas to block Republican redistricting map backed by Trump (BBC)

  • Trump and his allies mount a pressure campaign against US elections ahead of the midterms (CNN)

  • The Justice Department seeks voter and election information from at least 19 states (AP)

  • Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone (Silver Bulletin)

  • Larry Summers says Trump's accusations of manipulated jobs numbers are ‘preposterous’ (ABC)

  • ICE crackdown imperils Afghans who aided U.S. war effort, lawyers say (WP)

  • Inside the ‘Radical Transformation’ of America’s Environmental Role (NYT)

  • The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children (Wired)

  • ‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse (Guardian)

  • Palestinian activist who helped make Oscar-winning documentary 'No Other Land' killed in the West Bank (NPR)

  • Yes, Gen Z Is Staring at You. The Question Is Why. (NYT)

  • The uproar over Vogue’s AI-generated ad isn’t just about fashion (TechCrunch)

  • Mark Zuckerberg Just Declared War on the iPhone (WSJ)

  • A new trend in ‘death care’: AI obituaries (WP)

  • 114-Year-Old Attributes Longevity to Sheer Random Chance (The Onion)

MUSIC:

Stop Draggin' My Heart Around - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers with Stevie Nicks 

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Sunday, August 03, 2025

Letter from North Islington

The last night I was in London, I started loving the place. Why does it always have to be this way?

(Note: This was written way back in the past century when I was a world traveler.)

Of course, new places make new demands. We’re not all up to that, at least not every time. Certainly not me, not this time. Because I arrived in a deep funk, and not even London could rouse me from it.

Starting at Heathrow, therefore, I pretended I wasn’t here. This was a tested strategy of mine – since I wasn’t really here, then I didn’t have to be depressed or lonely.

A few nights into my visit, which can best be characterized as a miserably ill-timed, wasted week lacking any semblance of utility, I had already tasted all the ports and warm beers London has to offer the casual visitor, and I was getting mighty sick of my dormitory-like accommodations. 

Dormitory, you say? Listen, London is like a Third World country, once you get out of the five-star tourist district, and I was way out from there, stuck in North Islington, which supposedly is a happening place whenever the Labor Party is in power, but not necessarily for a guy down on his luck without any local connections in town to give a forgettable speech at a poorly attended conference..

The desk clerk in my dorm, whom I often visited to buy another minimum-level phone card to place calls back to my homeland, has a lovely way of enunciating “So it’s the two-pound card again, sir, is it?” I love the way she says that, so of course I never buy more than the bare minimum. She is, after all, my main contact with anyone outside of the voices pounding inside my own head during this mistaken week in what otherwise may well be an urban paradise.

Luckily, at this point, I remembered the one good reason to go walking all over the place with such resoluteness. I was there, I remembered somewhat unsteadily, on behalf of my son. The poor boy, survivor of my broken marriage, has always liked leaden soldiers, those wonderfully red-painted figures, with guns and hats that Robert Louis Stevenson arranged on his bedcovers into the Land of Counterpane.

Those leaden soldiers have become politically incorrect where I come from, with lead causing irreversible brain damage and all, but God Save the Queen, I’m sure I can find them here in good old London.

I am like a heat-seeking missile when it comes to finding something my dear son wants; ignoring the fact that he’s grown up now, long past the point of playing with soldiers. There’s no stopping me, a skilled shopper, a mercenary who knows how to penetrate the local culture seamlessly and emerge unscathed, prize in hand.

This, then, actually, is the story of how I found some of those antique leaden soldiers Stevenson wrote about well before they were antiques. It turns out that that miserably upscale neighborhood near my dormitory, the aforementioned North Islington, has a Saturday morning antiques fair. 

Yes! Sort of like a street fair, only the merchants are these craggy old people with crooked faces right out of a Dickens novel. Or maybe Hugo. I think I have found the Master of the House, and where he is operating these days: The back alleys of North Islington.

Well, crafty shopper that I am, I made my way through these twirling alleys, going shop to shop until -- presto! -- I laid my quivering hands on a prized set of truly antique-looking red British leaden soldiers. They had a strangely familiar look to them, in pose and garb, as if maybe my own deep English ancestry was perhaps coming forth, in the form of these charming little figurines, but I dismissed that thought to commence the bartering process. 

That night was to be my last in London. A couple other Americans from the conference showed up at my dormitory room uninvited, just as I was about to buy another phone card from the front desk clerk, and they invited me out to the nearest pub -- apparently for old times sake.

I carefully concealed my soldier treasures inside a ridiculous paper wrapper, under a book, inside my trashcan, and went off with my dear new colleagues to the pub. Once there, we drank ourselves silly. After all, it was out last night together, and though we’d just met, there’s something special about the prospect of separating from new friends such as these. With any luck you'll never see each other again; but if you do, you won’t remember any of the details anyway.

I studied my colleagues for signs of sentience. The hefty one, from someplace in the Midwest, was truly having a life experience here in North Islington. Turns out he’d never before been out of the States, not even out of the Midwest. He liked beer a lot, and he’d had enough in London to be prepared to deliver to all of his relatives and friends a decidedly prosaic trip report.

My other drinking pal reminded me of my younger self. He was thin, dark and brooding. Sophisticated, a world traveler, he knew we were just three castaways, alone for a moment in a place and a time that would never recur. While he was contemplating that, I suddenly noticed (about 3 beers in) how many really cute women there actually were here in this pub.

For example, those two Japanese girls, drinking and laughing and flirting nervously with some rugby types who had just showed up. Or, a table of English girls, one tall and slender, dark-haired and lovely, straight across in my line of sight on the patio of the pub where we were all happily congregating.

At moments like this, time slows to a pleasing crawl. We are serene, in the proper space at the proper time. My colleagues are babbling on, the first about the Midwest and its comforting regularity, the other on the darkness of the world overall. I squint over at my second mate. How is it that the weight of the world has found its way onto him? 

But then, back again, my eyes find the lovely dark-haired girl. Did I mention how much I like English women? With an elegant gesture, she orders another drink, so I buy a round for our table. Drink to drink, we share the evening air, across that crowded patio, she and I. Her voice rises above the others, drifting over to me, as a melody of fragments, note by note.

My drinking buddies are not aware of her, but I am in heaven, nodding to them, whilst observing her all the while, even as her inevitable boyfriend makes his bloody appearance. Slumping against her chair, sharing sloppy toasts with his obviously drunken buddies, he leans on her, with an air of propriety. She pretends to ignore this for a moment, then casts his hand away, but soon enough he resumes his entitled groping.

Across the patio, I am thoroughly sedated by now, vaguely aware the lights have flashed on and off, it’s closing time and my partners are beginning to rise for retirement to our mutual barracks somewhere off to the south. Chairs are being stacked, just out of my peripheral vision, but I am still focused on my angel, the dark-haired beauty with a singsong accent. 

Her motility-challenged boyfriend, so drunk he is peeing in the “bathroom” just beyond where the pub lights reach, will be back soon. Her eyes are dewy and lit, her posture that of a maid in waiting, happily anticipating that she’ll soon be wrapped in his muscled arms, staggering back somewhere, to an apartment here in North Islington.

I am (quite generously) happy for her.

My pals and I stagger home, too, and bid our final adieus. The hefty fellow promises he will eat hamburgers every day for a week when he hits his home ground, and I believe him. My brooding brother, meanwhile, is pondering the meaning of our trip, including all three of our speeches (I’d missed theirs.) 

The next day, floating high over Newfoundland, I retrieve the special leaden treasures from my briefcase and run my fingers lovingly over them, anticipating my boy’s delight, even though he is long past the age of caring about silly gifts like these.

My seatmate, a fellow built not unlike my Midwestern pal at the pub, lacks all discretion, and so breaks into my reverie. “Hey, aren’t those the Beefeaters figures -- you know, the guys on the liquor bottles? The ones they give out as promos?”

“Ah,” I murmur deftly, covering up my utter sense of deflation. “But hard to find in this condition, you know, since they are the pristine original issue. Limited editions. Mint. Straight from the source -- North Islington.”

Shrugging, he turned back to his wrestling magazine, and I to my reverie. 

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